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Sneak Preview: Red Dawn Remake
Last night I took Aki out on his 18th birthday (Eighteen! Once there was this little baby I could hold in two hands, now there's a man living in my house who calls me Dad....) for dinner and a preview screening of the remake of Red Dawn (I scored tickets in a promotion by Monday magazine).
The inestimable![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sabotabby has taken apart the original here: http://sabotabby.livejournal.com/479383.html and
here http://sabotabby.livejournal.com/479521.html and
here http://sabotabby.livejournal.com/480067.html
and while she wrote the gut-bustingest review ever, after seeing the remake I think I prefer the hokey original, after all.
Why is that... I think in the end, I can say that I prefer it because it's more honest - more honest in the consistency of the mad logic of its paranoia, more honest in the effort it took to make, more honest in the authenticity of its overt manipulation, ham-handedness and earnest simple-mindedness.
The remake was originally made in 2008-09, I'm not sure why but perhaps they were looking to capitalize on some 80s nostalgia. The film was "updated" to revolve around an invasion by the People's Liberation Army. MGM, the production company, was to release it in 2010 but went bankrupt and restructured, delaying the film's release until 2011. When advance publicity came out, there was hue and cry in Chinese media and MGM, who wanted MGM movies to play in Chinese theatres one day (not this one of course, but MGM makes a lot of movies), yanked it again, to change the enemy from China to North Korea, a truly pariah nation.
According to Wikitoolazytolookfurtherpedia, the change took less than $1 M (on a production budget of $75 M) as they reshot a few scenes and changed all the Chinese insignia to North Korean in digital post-production. This alone reminds me so much of the event in Nineteen eighty-four where Winston Smith is at a Hate Week Rally and a speaker changes the enemy from Eurasia to Eastasia mid-speech - within a few minutes, after the posters and banners that had been put up by the agents of Goldstein have all been torn down, the crowd is back hating, just at a different enemy - and poor Winston has a week of overtime work and revision ahead of him as they have to prove that Eastasia has always been the enemy. Except that Winston is not manufacturing lies for ideological and political consistency, he is doing it so his employer does not lose market share.
I mentioned honesty in paranoid logic and honesty in effort with respect to the earlier movie. Of course the premise is ludicrous and logistically impossible, this is a fantasy movie after all - but in the original film they made some effort to draw up some backstory, made some reference to world events outside the USA, and made prodigious efforts to create realistic props, do research on uniforms and weapons, and even teach the actors and extras some infantry fieldcraft so the film has some military verisimilitude (I even recall reading at the time an admiring article in Soldier of Fortune magazine about how hard John Milius had tried to get the look of things right). In the remake all the vehicles and many of the weapons are actually American - the Korean invaders are driving around in Hummers and an M-1 tank - and while they are usually carrying AK-47s, the uniforms they are wearing appear to be variations on the digital camouflage currently used by the US Marine Corps (though there are lots of civilianized variations, the Korean People's Army does not wear anything like it). Certainly this does not mean anything to most people, but to me it is just one more measure of the film's half-assedness.
The original film was a loud, stupid action movie that was not afraid to stand up on its hind legs and bray about how stupid and manipulative it was - e.g. scenes like where Harry Dean Stanton and other prisoners, about to be gunned down by the invaders, start to sing America the Beautiful. The remake is much louder, the camera work far more jerky and kinetic, but there is a curious emotional detachment about it all. This is shown especially well in the original film, where there are a few attempts to humanize the enemy - e.g. the scene where C. Thomas Howell makes his first kill, the scene where they execute one of their own and a Russian prisoner, and the character of that doubtful-emo Cuban Colonel Bella. In the remake, the adversary is one Captain Cho, who does nothing but scowl at people and bark in Korean - and he's the only enemy we even hear speak with subtitled Korean, all the others are essentially faceless First-Person Shooter video game faceless ciphers who yell and fall down.
This emotional detachment extends to the "good guys" as well - the original film had some real actors in it, character actors like Powers Boothe, Judd Omen and Harry Dean Stanton but also young actors who mostly went on to longer if not exactly distinguished careers. And while you didn't exactly care about them, they could at least emote, and made some kind of personal adjustment during the course of the film. In the remake, the actors (who all seem to have been in quite a few movies and TV shows already) may change clothes from time to time, they don't change as people - consequently you care as little about them as you do the faceless enemy.
So in summary, the remake was just half-assed. From the interchangeable enemy altered in post-production, to the laziness of the film's art direction, to the general lack-of-affect involvement with any of the characters, the film just comes across as a left-handed job that was made because someone decreed that it be made, in the hopes that it would make money. At least John Milius had his crazed convictions to sustain him through the original film's absurdities and drag home an emotional carcass of a B-movie; this was just a waste of time that had learned nothing from its predecessor and was not intersted in making any new mistakes, either.
While copies of the original Red Dawn will still be on the shelves in years to come (preferably the Special Edition with the in-screen "Carnage Meter" that ticks up everytime someone gets killed), I don't think anyone associated with this project would care to remember it.
The inestimable
sabotabby has taken apart the original here: http://sabotabby.livejournal.com/479383.html andhere http://sabotabby.livejournal.com/479521.html and
here http://sabotabby.livejournal.com/480067.html
and while she wrote the gut-bustingest review ever, after seeing the remake I think I prefer the hokey original, after all.
Why is that... I think in the end, I can say that I prefer it because it's more honest - more honest in the consistency of the mad logic of its paranoia, more honest in the effort it took to make, more honest in the authenticity of its overt manipulation, ham-handedness and earnest simple-mindedness.
The remake was originally made in 2008-09, I'm not sure why but perhaps they were looking to capitalize on some 80s nostalgia. The film was "updated" to revolve around an invasion by the People's Liberation Army. MGM, the production company, was to release it in 2010 but went bankrupt and restructured, delaying the film's release until 2011. When advance publicity came out, there was hue and cry in Chinese media and MGM, who wanted MGM movies to play in Chinese theatres one day (not this one of course, but MGM makes a lot of movies), yanked it again, to change the enemy from China to North Korea, a truly pariah nation.
According to Wikitoolazytolookfurtherpedia, the change took less than $1 M (on a production budget of $75 M) as they reshot a few scenes and changed all the Chinese insignia to North Korean in digital post-production. This alone reminds me so much of the event in Nineteen eighty-four where Winston Smith is at a Hate Week Rally and a speaker changes the enemy from Eurasia to Eastasia mid-speech - within a few minutes, after the posters and banners that had been put up by the agents of Goldstein have all been torn down, the crowd is back hating, just at a different enemy - and poor Winston has a week of overtime work and revision ahead of him as they have to prove that Eastasia has always been the enemy. Except that Winston is not manufacturing lies for ideological and political consistency, he is doing it so his employer does not lose market share.
I mentioned honesty in paranoid logic and honesty in effort with respect to the earlier movie. Of course the premise is ludicrous and logistically impossible, this is a fantasy movie after all - but in the original film they made some effort to draw up some backstory, made some reference to world events outside the USA, and made prodigious efforts to create realistic props, do research on uniforms and weapons, and even teach the actors and extras some infantry fieldcraft so the film has some military verisimilitude (I even recall reading at the time an admiring article in Soldier of Fortune magazine about how hard John Milius had tried to get the look of things right). In the remake all the vehicles and many of the weapons are actually American - the Korean invaders are driving around in Hummers and an M-1 tank - and while they are usually carrying AK-47s, the uniforms they are wearing appear to be variations on the digital camouflage currently used by the US Marine Corps (though there are lots of civilianized variations, the Korean People's Army does not wear anything like it). Certainly this does not mean anything to most people, but to me it is just one more measure of the film's half-assedness.
The original film was a loud, stupid action movie that was not afraid to stand up on its hind legs and bray about how stupid and manipulative it was - e.g. scenes like where Harry Dean Stanton and other prisoners, about to be gunned down by the invaders, start to sing America the Beautiful. The remake is much louder, the camera work far more jerky and kinetic, but there is a curious emotional detachment about it all. This is shown especially well in the original film, where there are a few attempts to humanize the enemy - e.g. the scene where C. Thomas Howell makes his first kill, the scene where they execute one of their own and a Russian prisoner, and the character of that doubtful-emo Cuban Colonel Bella. In the remake, the adversary is one Captain Cho, who does nothing but scowl at people and bark in Korean - and he's the only enemy we even hear speak with subtitled Korean, all the others are essentially faceless First-Person Shooter video game faceless ciphers who yell and fall down.
This emotional detachment extends to the "good guys" as well - the original film had some real actors in it, character actors like Powers Boothe, Judd Omen and Harry Dean Stanton but also young actors who mostly went on to longer if not exactly distinguished careers. And while you didn't exactly care about them, they could at least emote, and made some kind of personal adjustment during the course of the film. In the remake, the actors (who all seem to have been in quite a few movies and TV shows already) may change clothes from time to time, they don't change as people - consequently you care as little about them as you do the faceless enemy.
So in summary, the remake was just half-assed. From the interchangeable enemy altered in post-production, to the laziness of the film's art direction, to the general lack-of-affect involvement with any of the characters, the film just comes across as a left-handed job that was made because someone decreed that it be made, in the hopes that it would make money. At least John Milius had his crazed convictions to sustain him through the original film's absurdities and drag home an emotional carcass of a B-movie; this was just a waste of time that had learned nothing from its predecessor and was not intersted in making any new mistakes, either.
While copies of the original Red Dawn will still be on the shelves in years to come (preferably the Special Edition with the in-screen "Carnage Meter" that ticks up everytime someone gets killed), I don't think anyone associated with this project would care to remember it.